Filming the Notes: Audiovisual Strategies in Popular Music Composition and Production
Filming the Notes: Audiovisual Strategies in Popular Music Composition and Production

Summary/Abstract: This article juxtaposes the subjective and the objective in the study of musical signification. It makes an attempt at a vicious core problem of notions that are general in their essence and prevalence. The interest is driven by general trends challenging the position of research in music, semiotics, and humanities. The problem persists, for instance, in Western art music (WAM), where the performer has the task of assessing the composer’s objectives and mediating them, but with a subjective interpretation, for the breadth of the audience to experience.The gist is that the juxtaposition is a false dichotomy, resolving to moderation, as the absolute objectiveness is mollified by fallibility of inquiry and the absolute subjectiveness by the shared embodied experience of the world. This is elaborated based on classical and current pragmatist conceptions of inquiry, semiosis, embodiment, hard and soft facts, and cognitive metaphors, addressing the body-mind and the body-social problem.Practices of composing and producing a song bear similarities with filmmaking, particularly the stages of development, mise-en-scène and montage. This particular topic, when approached at scholarly level, becomes suddenly superficial. Not that it is scarcely analyzed, but even authors themselves tend to take for granted that a song shares some representation strategies with an audiovisual text. Musicologists can elaborate on these concepts, but their analyses tend to be mere parallels and not rigorous comparisons. When instead we try to elaborate on defined strategies of audiovisual representation, we feel the lack of exhaustive research models.The present article, along with the author’s recent work (particularly Martinelli-Bucciarelli 2023), aims at being an opportunity to (begin to) fill this gap, allowing reflections on specific filmic strategies applied to popular music. The case-studies will be the so-called “focus of the songs” (Marconi 2009) and the application of montage theory (particularly Eisenstein’s) on music production.

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